The Narrator's Dad

Character Analysis

The narrator's father only appears twice in the novel, but each time he seems to be fairly revealing of the narrator's own character. First, in Chapter 1, Section 4, when his father points out to the narrator that none of his books seem to have villains, the narrator answers that the war taught him not to cast anyone as a villain. This seems consistent with the narrator's overall point that Dresden's miseries are worth writing about even if Germany did terrible things during the war. After all, human suffering is human suffering.

The second place the narrator's father appears is in Chapter 10, Section 1, where the narrator tells us that he was a nice man with a gun collection, which he passed on to the narrator. The narrator never uses the guns, though; he had seen too much senseless violence in the war.